Grigor frowned, his maw taking on a strange appearance as he did so. Only long familiarity with Kashlovians allowed Rys to make out his old friend’s expression.
“Many things have changed in your absence,” Grigor said. “Darus in particular changed during her apprenticeship to the archdevil Kauros. She is one of the greatest of powers in Hell now. Possibly the greatest, besides the Devil Queen and Malusian themselves.”
Rys grimaced. That explained a lot.
There were only three archdevils alive, at least in Rys’s time. The Devil Queen Ariel, who technically ruled all infernals. Malusian, who refused to recognize Ariel’s rule and believed she had stolen the throne from him.
And Kauros. A knowledge devil who had become an archdevil. His rise to power was so famous that Ariel and Malusian had wiped out his particular species of knowledge devil. Everybody knew about Kauros.
Rys knew the bastard personally. The archdevil creeped him the fuck out. There was a reason that Rys had never accepted a knowledge Gift from Kauros. The likelihood that it was a trap was too high. Letting somebody like Kauros touch his soul could have destroyed him.
“We’ll need to speak about this in the future,” Rys said.
He stood and brushed himself off.
“For the time being, let’s see if Vallis has returned. She might have brought something to drink,” Rys said.
Grigor’s eyes glowed at the idea of drinking with Rys. The two of them wandered up to the castle’s hall and traded small talk as they walked.
For a moment, it felt like old times.
Chapter 6
Vallis returned not long after midnight. Rys had installed windows and a skylight in the main hall of the keep, allowing him to keep track of the time from inside.
The hours before Vallis’s return passed quickly as Grigor and Rys chatted at a long table. They mostly spoke about recent events in Hell. Grigor’s mind seemed consumed by the last few years in particular. Little was said about their old comrades, and Rys let the topic lie for now.
Fara joined them at some point. She produced a comb from within her outfit and ran it through her tails. Although she didn’t join in the conversation, Rys and Grigor still turned to invite her.
“I definitely made the right call,” Vallis called out from the entrance upon returning. “You rebuilt the castle in an evening. How impressive, right, Fara?”
A flat look crossed Fara’s face as she stared at Vallis. Rys and Grigor stopped talking and looked over.
Vallis stood in the entryway, struggling to carry a wooden crate. The crate contained a random assortment of objects, including what looked like a rolled-up length of parchment. Her arms shook with the effort it took the hold it up and every step took effort.
Glaring at them over the top of the crate, Vallis said, “A little help?”
Rys and Grigor looked at Fara. She stared blankly back at them and continued to comb her tails.
“Allow me,” Grigor said, rising from his stool.
Vallis froze. Her eyes widened as she watched the demon prince walk over to her. She wasn’t short, but any human—particularly a woman—looked tiny next to Grigor.
He reached down and plucked the crate from her arms with one hand. She stumbled backward, barely preventing herself from falling over. When a giggle escaped Fara, Vallis shot a thunderous scowl at the fox.
Ignoring their antics, Grigor brought the crate over to the table.
“I assume there are more outside?” Grigor said.
“What?” Vallis said. Then she blinked, a silly smile crossing her face. “Oh. Yeah. There’s a cart full of supplies outside. I brought a bunch of things that I thought might be useful.”
Her face lit up in expectation, eyes glittering at the idea that Grigor would carry everything inside for her.
Then Grigor turned toward the sub-level staircase and let out a guttural shout in demonic. Vallis covered her ears. Once again, Fara giggled, not even trying to hide it this time.
A few demons jogged up the stairs within moments. Their eyes locked onto Vallis instantly.
Or more accurately, one particularly large part of Vallis.
Grigor’s eyes shined within his mask. The demons stopped leering at Vallis’s breasts and fell into a line. After a few more barked orders, the three lesser demons were carrying the cart’s supplies into the sub-levels.
“Shouldn’t you do something about them?” Vallis said with a pout.
Rys didn’t know if she was pouting because the demons leered at her or because Grigor didn’t personally unload her cart. It didn’t matter.
“That’s what Grigor is for. It’s called delegation,” Rys said.
He gestured for her to sit down. She did, deliberating sitting away from Fara.
“What happens when you need to order them around yourself?” Fara asked, looking up from her grooming. “If they don’t respect you, they might ignore your orders. Or worse, rebel.”
“Have you noticed any attempts by them to rebel? Or any resistance at all?” he asked.
Fara bit the inside of her lip. “No. They leer at me, but they completely ignore you.” Her eyes narrowed. “No, they avoid you. How is that good?”
“Because Rys intimidates them,” Grigor rumbled as he returned to his seat.
Vallis jumped at the sound of his voice, but quickly calmed down. “Really? Huge demons with biceps as thick as his chest, the heads of birds and goats, and probably enough strength to bend steel?”
“They can feel my power through the summoning connection,” Rys said. “When I summon infernals, they’re tied to my magical essence.”
“And they know who he is. Malusian’s lost general. I sometimes tell them stories of our battles in Harrium,” Grigor said. “Demons learn at a young age to avoid attention from powerful infernals.”
Fara looked at Rys. “You said something like that before. That attracting attention was a mistake.”
“If a powerful infernal takes an interest in you, it’s usually for their own amusement,” Rys said. “While I sometimes lucked out, Lacrissa turned me into her pet for decades.”
“Pet?” Vallis asked, tilting her head.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
That length of parchment bothered him, so he pulled it out of the crate for a change of subject.
It turned out to be a large piece of vellum.
“A map,” Rys said.
“Figured you might like it,” Vallis said. “My father commissioned it just before his untimely death—for reference, the untimely part is that he didn’t die sooner. Would have saved me a lot of grief if he’d fallen down a flight of stairs sooner and not buried me in debt. But at least you can use one of his follies.”
“It’s a fairly good-looking map. What makes it a folly?” Rys rolled it out and gave it an appraising eye.
It had more detail than the one that Darus showed him earlier. The smaller islands were named, and the countries were marked on this one.
“It has no use to anybody,” Vallis said with a dark laugh. “So it ended up being an expensive vanity project. Paying cartographers to sail around the entire archipelago wasn’t cheap. It’s the best map I’ve seen, but nobody needs this. Naval charts look entirely different. Most people want something with more detail for their local region. I’m pretty sure half of it is out of date, given the coastline changes due to the foul wind that blows in from the south-east.”
Rys had a pretty good idea what that foul wind was, but it didn’t impact him right now.
“Vanity.” He smirked. “Is that why you brought it for me?”
“Maybe.” Vallis tried not to smile.
He’d already gone over most of the important details with Darus, but he made a show of analyzing the map now. Most of the additional details weren’t important right now. He couldn’t leave his castle. How could he sail across the archipelago?
Suddenly, Orthrus spoke up, “The archipelago has changed too much for the cause to be natural.
Something is very wrong.”
Fara looked at Rys expectantly. He focused his attention on the islands.
“Well?” Fara asked Rys when he didn’t say anything.
“The archipelago has changed at some point,” he said.
“Your adviser,” she said. “I’d ask how he knows, but he somehow figured out how to get this castle up and running.”
Orthrus grumbled, muttering to himself. Eventually, he spoke loud enough for Rys to make out what he was saying, “The south-eastern islands were not here when I was… active. The appearance of several islands requires an immense amount of power.”
That was a stretch.
Then something clicked with Rys. He recognized one of the smaller islands, the one named Malovik. It had been an angelic fortress during the Cataclysm.
The problem was that it had been destroyed along with a continent during the Cataclysm, because that island had been just off that continent’s coast.
“I thought these islands were destroyed in the Cataclysm,” Rys muttered. He traced a line around the islands that Orthrus identified.
Everything south-east of Dalyros didn’t belong to the original archipelago. Malovik, Sevriada, the Catic Crescent, and even half of Tarashu. Rys wondered how half of an island had ended up combined with another.
“This is a problem,” Orthrus said.
Rys remained silent, even as the others around him chattered about the map. They had moved on when he hadn’t said much. Instead, Grigor had taken a keen interest in the immediate area.
“The fox mentioned that the Labyrinth only extends to some of the islands. This must be the cause. The Labyrinth can’t appear on the new islands.” Orthrus made a strange clicking noise. “If any of the power conduits have been taken to these islands, then you won’t be able to reach them from the Labyrinth.”
Rys wanted to shout at the stupid wisp for talking about this near the others. Then again, Grigor had them distracted. He took the opportunity to slip away. Fara watched him, but didn’t follow.
“How?” Rys asked. “You sounded confident that they would be in the Labyrinth.”
Orthrus didn’t answer for close to a minute. That did not improve Rys’s trust in him.
“The power conduits draw on the Labyrinth to operate,” Orthrus eventually said. “But you were sealed here not long after you say the new islands were moved here. There may be a connection.”
That was horrifically vague. Orthrus knew more. Rys was certain of that.
But getting more out of the wisp was impossible. For whatever reason, Orthrus preferred to say as little as possible. He made for an irritating partner to work with, but an easy one to ignore. If Rys weren’t trapped in a horribly complicated magical seal he knew nothing about, he wouldn’t care.
But he was, and Orthrus’s attitude irritated him.
“Fine. Keep your secrets,” Rys said, choosing to avoid confrontation. “That means I’ll need an army to handle matters outside the Labyrinth, won’t I? Otherwise, I’ll never be free.”
“That’s correct. We’ll be trapped here forever,” Orthrus said.
That only subtly changed Rys’s objectives. His original intentions had been to ignore the world around him and focus entirely on the Labyrinth, at least until he had his power back.
Now that seemed impossible, or at least unwise.
A grin crossed his face as he returned to the table. This felt like the perfect excuse to create an empire.
No royal devils to boss him around. No angels to stop him. No dragons to mount a rebellion.
“You seem happy,” Fara said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rys said. “Vallis, I’ll be working more closely with you than I expected.”
The merchant blinked, turning toward him. “Okay? I thought you were going to ignore me and focus on the Labyrinth.”
“Maybe for a little while. But then we’ll be working closely together,” Rys said.
All he needed was some of his power back and he would feel more comfortable.
The impromptu meeting broke up shortly afterward, after Vallis let out a yawn. Fara ushered her away.
A bottle of spirits shined from within Vallis’s crate. Grigor and Rys helped themselves to it. They continued to trade stories throughout the night.
It felt like old times. But the Labyrinth beckoned.
Chapter 7
Morning arrived. Rys and Grigor had long since gone their separate ways.
Grigor surveyed the area outside the castle, sending a messenger back to Rys every so often to inform him about of what he found. Which was a lot of nothing, but Grigor knew that Rys valued knowledge.
Knowledge was power, and power was everything.
Rys cloistered himself inside the control room. Earlier in the night, he had spared some time to summon some imps. They were a servile species of infernal that helped with menial labor. Normal demons would probably put holes in a wall if they tried to clean it.
The glowing blueprint of the castle hovered over the dais. It shifted and changed according to Rys’s will, and he muttered to himself as it did. Every so often, part of it changed from blue to red.
Hours of experimentation had taught Rys many things about this method of castle construction.
First, he had a hard limit on how much space he had access to. Orthrus had hummed when this pointed out, then said something about how the castle had seemed much bigger when he was around.
Assuming the glowing orb hadn’t become senile, that likely meant that Rys needed more slates to use all the space around the castle.
Second, he had the ability to freely transform the terrain within that space. The clearing around the castle almost certainly wasn’t natural. He’d found a nearby spring within the mountain, but he doubted if it even that belonged here. Everything about this place seemed off.
Rys felt as though he had found a lost artifact of a god and was now fumbling about without any awareness of the damage he might cause. He’d never been this concerned about what he might be able to do with his power before. The world had a knack for putting itself right.
Magic was called magic because it didn’t belong in Harrium. Magical energy and anything created by it was forced out of the material realm over time. Rys knew techniques to slow that process, but he considered no magic to be truly permanent. Given the chance, the world would banish the magical creation back to wherever it came from.
Castle Aion didn’t care about the rules of the world. It did the magical equivalent of beating the world into submission, then simply did whatever it wanted.
The third thing Rys found out was that he could lock the castle’s design into place. Ordinarily, he changed things with a thought. Created new furniture. Extended a room. The castle defied spatial norms, he learned. A room could be larger on the inside than it was on the outside. But once locked down, Rys needed to unlock it in order to alter anything. Anything locked down glowed red in the blueprint. Blue meant it had been altered. Presumably, a white glow meant it had been unaltered, but nothing was white anymore.
Finally, the fourth thing was that there was an overall limitation to what he could create within the castle itself. The power slate appeared to be an immensely powerful source of energy, but the single one he had powered a lot of the castle. Rys suspected the other hollows were intended for slates that powered other aspects of the castle.
He didn’t know what the other hollows did. Which bothered him. The castle felt like an extension of his mind. Shouldn’t he know what each power slate did before he put them in? Something to worry about later.
For now, he redesigned the castle.
Now that Rys knew a little more about his immediate surroundings—thanks to Vallis’s map—he knew what attributes he needed to balance out.
Namely, he had to choose between building a defensible and intimidating fortress or something that blended in and felt welcoming to the locals.
When he had been a general in the Infernal Empire, Rys had built
a gargantuan fortress into a mountain. It had oozed the atmosphere of an evil overlord. But that worked at the time, as he both had the power to back it up and the responsibility to keep the local elven and draconic rulers in line.
Gigantic obsidian towers that poured lava down their walls might lead to swift downfall. Better save that for later.
Rys decided that blending in worked better for now and chose to construct a manor house. The closest nation on the map had been a hundred miles away. The nearby towns weren’t much of a threat. Grigor and his demons could likely handle any bandits or debt collectors.
The final design he wanted was far more grandiose than what he could currently build. He recalled some of the fancy manor houses in central Gauron that had doubled as offices. They had been shaped like hollow squares, with a large central courtyard. Each side of the building stood as a separate wing, and people could swiftly move between wings using the central courtyard.
Efficient. Rys liked efficiency in his designs.
Most castles and manor houses had lots of winding passages and odd corridors to confuse intruders and spies, but he wouldn’t need those. Once he grew in power and summoned succubi, they would be able to detect unwanted guests instantly.
For now, Rys built one of the manor wings. It had two levels and was opulently furnished. The blueprint had some additional capacity, so he built a small, detached building at the rear. It might prove useful for guests, or maybe even Fara.
Rys leaned away, looking up the finished blueprint. The entire thing glowed red.
“It will be a few weeks before everything is complete,” Orthrus said, startling Rys. “With only one power slate, it will be spread thin building such a large design.”
“And here I thought I was being restrained,” he said.
“I’m surprised that it let you do so much so fast,” Orthrus muttered. “I expected we would need more slates.”
“That sounds like a good reason to get more then,” Rys said.
But first, he needed weapons and armor. That meant a forge. Rys had cleaned up the sub-levels and added furniture to most rooms already, but now he converted one into a forge. The castle’s power let him create forging materials as well, but he wasn’t entirely certain if they’d last outside the field.
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